EAST LANSING - At the outset of a 50-minute teleconference with media on Thursday scheduled to detail the Michigan State athletic department’s plans to return student-athletes to campus amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Bill Beekman turned his attention to the nation’s trouble race relations.
“I would like to briefly address the racial issues that are permeating our country and are obviously very important to us here in East Lansing,” Beekman said at the beginning of the press conference.
Beekman, MSU’s athletic director, pledged an environment of safety and inclusion for the university’s student-athletes.
Beekman also announced that the university will soon create a new position within the athletic department entitled the Chief of Diversity for Michigan State Athletics.
Beekman said plans have been in the works to create the new position since last fall.
“I’m excited to announce that despite very serious budget constraints, in the coming weeks I will be posting the position,” Beekman said. “This position was one of five key priorities we identified in our strategic planning process last fall. It might be the only new position we post this year, but it’s just simply too important to wait.”
In the wake of the killing of Minneapolis citizen George Floyd and subsequent protests and troubles, Beekman reached out to MSU’s student-athletes earlier this week.
“On Monday, I sent a letter to our student-athletes, sharing my thoughts on the recent examples of violence against black Americans,” Beekman said. “In that letter I expressed the many emotions I had experienced over the last week - sadness, shock, anger, outrage. I especially wanted to make clear to our students that we in athletics are here to support them and hear them and that I personally am here to support them and hear them, and that their views and ideas are important and we all grow when they share their thoughts and perspectives with our community, that our campus will be a safe place for them to continue to learn and grow, and that diversity and inclusion aren’t things we do, but who we are.
“To paraphrase President Kennedy, at some point you have to turn good words into good deeds, and to that end, we will be doing a lot of talking and listening about race in the coming months.”
Beekman pointed out that on Thursday afternoon, MSU’s Diversity and Leadership Committee, a student-athlete run group, held a virtual meeting called “Black in America,” an open conversation with student-athletes and staff.
“I’ll be developing several work groups to help guide how we change for the better and those groups will include current and former student-athletes, staff, and coaches at all levels of Michigan State athletics,” Beekman said. “Speaking specifically to our former student-athletes, our actions today should have the goal of making Spartans of every era proud to be Spartans for life. Creating a culture isn’t a top-down thing. It’s not a bottom-up thing. It’s a team effort, so we’ll do it as a team.”
Beekman said the process will continue internally and externally.
“We will be implementing a thoroughly-revised educational series focused on race to help educate all within our department,” Beekman said. “We will supplement this educational programming by bringing to campus a series of nationally-renowned speakers and teachers so that together we can learn and grow.”
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